12 is perhaps the most important section: it deals with emotional factors in the research process. There are people in the lab who are on scholarship and whose cabinets are quite extensive. Find out what the best journal in the field is, perhaps by talking to someone who knows about it.
You need to be able to read theorems and the ability to prove them will impress most people in the field.
5 Notebooks
The analytic philosophy of mind largely shares a worldview with most people in AI. More recently, some researchers have considered it compatible with AI and as an alternative approach to the problem. The philosophy at MIT is analytical in nature and from a school heavily influenced by Chomsky's work in linguistics.
6 Writing
But as you get better at it, it gets faster, and if you approach it as a craft, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of the process in itself. Usually you should start with the body of the paper and write the introduction last, after you know what the paper actually says. Think of the article you write as one statement in a conversation you're having with other people in the field.
If you put off writing until you've done all the work, you lose most of the benefit. This practice has most of the benefits of writing a formal article (commentary, clarity of thought, writing exercises, and so on), but on a smaller scale and with much less work investment. Once you become part of the Secret Paper Passing Network, you will find that people give you copies of draft papers that they want comments on.
Read a few back issues of the journal or conference you are applying to to make sure the style and content of your paper is appropriate. By all means, be polite no matter which side of the review process you are on. If you publish multiple forms of a paper, such as a short conference version and a long journal version, it may go through several rounds.
7 Talks
This results in you still working on the paper years after you thought you were done with it and after the whole subject has become completely boring. Since revising a speech is generally much easier than revising a paper, some people find it a good way to find the right way to express their ideas. Studies on the effects of context on memory show that you will remember what you are going to say better if you have practiced in the room in which you are lecturing.
Attending such lectures is a good way to get a taste of areas you are not very familiar with, and if the lecture turns out to be boring, you can entertain yourself by analyzing what the speaker is doing wrong. An hour-long conversation can present the idea in context and reveal some ugly points. The people in the audience want to be there; they want to know what you have to say.
They're not just waiting for an excuse to attack you, and they'll feel more comfortable if you're relaxed. If you can't easily read your slides when you're standing and they're on the floor, they're too small. If you need to point to the overhead, don't actually touch the transparency as you will make it move around.
8 Programming
Some people vary in their rate, but a common mistake is to think you can do it faster than that and still be clear. If you have to point up, don't touch the transparency, as you will make it move. book; there are many regular AI programs in it. Ask half a dozen grad students if you can get the source code for their programs.
You will learn a lot of great tricks that you would not have thought of and that are not in any textbook. You'll also learn how not to write code when reading pages of incomprehensible uncommented gibberish. Many well-known Al programs worked on only three examples in the author's paper, although the field is less tolerant of this sloppiness than it used to be.).
This is where doing half a dozen programming projects in the last paragraph becomes really useful. Eventually you get so you can design and implement a custom TMS algorithm (say) in an afternoon. On the other hand, maybe that's what you really wanted to do for a living anyway.).
9 Advisors
Rewriting code until it's perfect, abstracting everything to the maximum, writing macros and libraries, and playing with the internals of the operating system has sucked many people out of their positions and out of the field. There is a lot of informal knowledge of both the technical aspects of the field and the research process that is not published anywhere. That gives you a group of people with whom you can talk about the problem as a whole.
Whether or not you can work with him or her may be more important to both of you than what you are working on. Finding a thesis advisor is one of the most important priorities of your first year as a graduate student. You should have one by the end of the first year, or early in the second year at the latest.
It gives a page or so of description of what each of the faculty and many of the graduate students are up to. Al is unusual as a discipline in that much of the useful work is done by graduate students, not people with doctorates, who are often too busy to be managers. Another consequence is that, since students' thesis directions are largely shaped by their advisors, the direction and growth of the field as a whole depends greatly on which advisors graduate students choose.
10 The thesis
It's important to have several people regularly reviewing your work because it's very easy to mislead yourself (and often your advisor) into thinking you're making progress when you're not, and thus go into space zoom. But it's probably not a good idea to go this route until you've completed at least one piece of supervised work, and unless you're confident you can manage without an advisor and have a solid support network. If a master's topic turns out to be a blockbuster, it can be split into parts, one for the master's and one for a PhD.
Keep in mind that the ones that are easy to come by are the ones that were published or made tech reports because someone thought they advanced the state of the art—in other words, because they did more than a master's thesis. . The actual writing of a PhD thesis generally takes about a year, and an often-proven rule of thumb is that it will drag on for a year after you're completely sick of it. It has a central part that you are very confident you can complete and that you and your advisor agree will meet the degree requirements.
However, you may find that there is no faculty member who can supervise a topic in that area that you are comfortable with. Staying in the same field simplifies things and will probably take one to two years from the total time to graduation, especially if a PhD-sized topic becomes apparent during the course of the Master's work. When you do the work, be able to simply explain how each part of your theory and application serves the purpose.
11 Research methodology
Once you've chosen a topic, be sure to be clear with your advisor about what completion will entail. If you and he have different expectations and don't realize it, you can lose badly. You may want to design an explicit final test, such as a set of cases that your theory or program can handle.
This document itself is an example of its authors avoiding thesis.). You are constantly confronted with research decisions that differ along a line between "nice" and "fun". Should you take the time to formalize this problem to some degree (so you can prove its intractability, for example) or should you deal with it in its raw form, which is ill-defined but closer to reality. Every piece of work, and every person, should aim for a judicious balance that formalizes sub-problems that seem to cry out for it while staying honest to the big picture.
You look at how people learn arithmetic, how the brain works, how kangaroos jump, and you try to figure it out and make a testable theory. Some jobs are like engineering: you try to build a better problem solver or shape algorithm. Some work is like mathematics: play with formalisms, try to understand their properties, tear them apart, prove things about them.
12 Emotional factors
Other times you get stuck and feel like you can't do anything for a long time. You can get a lot more work done by regularly setting short- and medium-term goals, for example weekly and monthly. You can make a deal with a friend to trade weekly goals and make a game of trying to achieve them.
Leave something easy or fun unfinished at night that you can start in the morning. One consequence of this is that you cannot please all the people all the time. Probably more important is that you talk to as many people as possible about your ideas and get their feedback.
A potential pitfall is discovering that all problems are harder than you expected, that research takes longer than you expected, and that you can't do it all by yourself. You have to face the fact that all you can do is contribute your part to a corner of the subfield so your thesis won't solve the big problems. It's a pain a lot of the time, but if the problem is right for you, you can tackle it like a game and enjoy the process.
Endnote
